Search in Book Reviews

Spreadsheets have come a long way since the days of VisiCalc, enabling the application of complex data manipulation and graphical display. This book consists of 24 chapters, each of which is a one-hour session describing a topic and its use. It is in three parts starting with basics; installing Excel, navigating the environment, entering and editing data, manipulating documents, using worksheets and templates. To support the discussion there are plenty of screen dumps showing what you should see after a particular action. Part 2 moves on to describe the facilities for graphical presentation of the information creating graphics, importing clipart, creating charts and maps. The power of a spreadsheet comes from the application of arithmetic operations on the stored data and part 3 describes these facilities in detail covering formulas, functions, sorting, filtering, pivot tables, wizards and add-ins. Once you have the results you need to do something with them and part 4 describes techniques for moving data between Excel and other MS Office tools and the WWW (e.g. exporting Excel worksheets, including charts and graphics, to HTML documents for publication on a web page). Each chapter starts with an overview, then the discussion and ends with a summary and a workshop, which includes a Q&A session and exercises to reinforce the learning process. Embedded into the text are useful boxes giving advice; 'TimeSavers' tips or tricks to save time, 'Caution' pointing out elements of the application which may cause problems and 'Just a minute' which clarify or elaborate on a topic.

A well written and presented book that can be used by anyone who needs to get beyond the basics of Excel. Clearly experience of the MS Windows environment is required but the reader does not need to be a computer expert in any sense of the term.